The NCAS Issues and Future Project Initiatives
 
By all measures, the NCAS project has been very successful.  The benefits to the OSC and the State include: The very success of the NCAS initiative has led to significant increases in the use of the system.  With this growth comes new requirements and the need for enhanced capabilities.  Some of the specific areas of growth and concern include system performance issues that must be addressed in the near term.  These include the need for increased volumes of detailed data and the need to do more complex queries and reports across the full volume of information and numerous years of historical data.  Another major issue is the current age of the Geac software used by the NCAS.  The Geac software was first acquired in 1987 and, at the time, it was one of the best financial application products on the market.  Although the Geac software has been upgraded and maintained on a regular basis, it is considered older technology by today’s standards.

In 1997, Forrester Research, Inc.  performed a study of IT executives and managers at fifty companies that had recently made application replacement decisions.  They also interviewed systems integrators and sixteen packaged application vendors.  Their report states that the decision to replace an application is dependent on many factors.  Some factors are worth the time to consider, while others should clearly not drive the replacement process.  In today’s business environment, influences such as what competitors are doing, one person’s executive mandate, year 2000 issues, and frustration with current applications may be the most salient reasons for deciding to start over with new requirements definition and vendor demonstrations of the newest technology.  While these are significant considerations, organizations that effectively replace their applications – that is, not too soon and not too late – favor a structured process of reviewing the application’s technical weakness and impact on unrealized business opportunities to make their replacement decisions.  Figures 14 and 15 display some metrics of technical weakness and unrealized business opportunities and the amount of risk associated with them.
 
 
Technical Weakness Metrics
High Risk
Medium Risk 
Low Risk
Age > 15 years 5 to 15 years < 5 years
Percentage of application that is modified > 30% 10% to 30%  < 10%
Architecture Batch On-line host Client/server
Actual maintenance cost as percentage of total replacement cost  >20%  10% to 20% <10%
Development language Assembler COBOL 4GL, C, C++, Java
Database layer Flat file or none Network / hierarchical RDBMS
Number of hard-wired interfaces > 5 3 to 5 < 3
Application knowledge available Source code Original developers Complete documentation

Figure 14.  Technical Weakness Metrics

 
Unrealized Business Opportunity Metrics
High Risk
Medium Risk
Low Risk
Opportunity for revenue increase Direct role Supporting role No role
Decibel level of requests Must-have Want-to-have Nice-to-have or none
Frequency of requests Once a week or greater Once a month Once a year or never
Most senior requestor Executive  Manager Clerk or below
Amount of Business Process Reengineering in area of application Multimillion dollar reengineering Organizational change Limited or none
Figure 15.  Unrealized Business Opportunity Metrics
  
Applications that fit into the High Risk categories on both scales are candidates for replacement.  The results from an assessment such as this do not entirely determine whether or not to replace an application.  They enable organizations to grasp which applications are likely candidates and should be further analyzed.  They also provide insight into which applications would benefit from enhancements to increase their impact on business opportunities and capitalize on existing technology.

An effective application replacement process has the following characteristics:

It is clear that, based on the technical weakness metrics alone,  the current Geac system supporting the NCAS is in the medium to high risk area and will be moving into the high risk zone as the software further matures.  In addition, the Geac software has been heavily modified to support the NCAS unique requirements.  Therefore, the OSC has initiated several efforts to insure a proactive, orderly migration from the current older Geac mainframe environment to a 21st century technology solution.  The migration path will extend the life of the Geac software on the mainframe, while adding capability in the domains of client/server and data warehouse technology.  The OSC has taken several good incremental steps required for the optimum migration strategy.  The first of these includes extracting some of the data and creating structures in the client/server domain to facilitate reporting capabilities and reduce costs.  However, the software that currently performs these functions is directly linked to the Geac software and is itself older technology which needs to be re-evaluated for upgrade or replacement.  The OSC is therefore designing a more efficient data warehouse strategy for near term implementation and will be better positioned to evaluate other technology alternatives once the additional data is available in its DSS.  The OSC is prepared to take the steps outlined below.